11 May 2023
That was a nice surprise upon arrival in Leuven for the Twelfth Annual REFORC Conference: Jehona Kicaj (Brill/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) handed the latest volume in the R5AS series to one of the editors, also a keynote lecturer at the conference, Eleonora Rai (Turin/Leuven).
“Profiling Saints” follows and expands the papers presented at the homonym online international conference (December 2021), which focused on cultural, theological, artistic, and social aspects of models of sanctity and their importance in the modern world up to the post-revolutionary period. This volume aims thus to shed light on the cultural value of canonizations and models of sanctity as models of Christian perfection, including the role of iconography and artworks, in the broader context of modern, global Catholicism. The topics presented by the authors include veneration to, and canonization and representations of, saint theologians, missionaries, martyrs, mystics, and reformers, men and women. “Profiling Saints” looks at modern sanctity and saints from multidisciplinary perspectives, ranging from liturgy, theology, and Church history up to history of ideas, cultural history, history of emotions, and art history, and contributes to shed light on such a complex phenomenon of Christian history in its modern developments.